Why James Poulos Broke For Neither

I can accept that Romney’s failure to run a campaign grounded in a basic integrity isn’t coming from a place of deep personal corruption. But I cannot excuse that failure — and even if I could (which, under present electoral circumstances, after a few drinks I really probably could), I cannot reward the Republican Party for putting itself in a situation where the only viable general election candidate it was able to field had to proceed from a position of a lack of integrity.

I had hoped right up through the debates that Mitt Romney would take his power as nominee and use it to immediately begin cleaning house — putting the GOP on notice that it, not he, was coreless, and that it, not he, needed to accommodate to win. I still believe Romney could do this — especially as president — but now I doubt gravely that he will. There is a profoundly irritating quality about Romney that he shares with the current president. Both men seem genuinely disinterested in leadership — particularly in the hard work of enrolling peers and superiors in a shared undertaking of their own design. Obama’s political acumen has always been located in the realm of imagination. Romney’s has always been located on paper, in a spreadsheet. Both of these are disillusioning and destructive abdications of the real-life ground of leadership. In the presidency, these kinds of shortcomings can be the difference between success and ruin.

I have had many conversations this election season with people who planned to vote for Romney about how horrible beyond all telling Barack Obama is. I haven’t had a single conversation with a Romney voter about how wonderful Romney is. More from Poulos:

Then why not Obama? The answers are plain. Everything frustrating and displeasing about Romney reappears elevated to its archetype in Obama. In Barack Obama we have a man with little patience or taste for true leadership, with a defining disproportion between his experience and his power, who is a bigger hypocrite than Romney and far more consequentially so.

One of the fascinating things about voting USA style (two party system) is that it empowers those who are willing to give ground, and removes power from guys like Poulos, who won’t negotiate.

And writ large, guys like Poulos make a sizable chunk of the electorate, so they basically create a nation where people who are picky voters remove themselves from the voting pool completely.

It reminds me of war in modern times: the nations who have citizens who blindly follow their nation to the death, right or wrong, have a certain power over those nations who have citizens who think carefully before being willing to fight for their country. It’s an interesting dilemma.

…… In any state with a binding “None of the Above” ballot option, the list of candidates for each office would be followed by the votable line “None of the Above; For a New Election”, or something similar. If that option gets more votes than any candidate for the office, then no one is elected to the office; instead, a follow-up by-election with new candidates must be held to fill that office, until a candidate wins a plurality of votes among all other candidates including “None of the Above.”